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What Are You Going to do Differently with Smart Manufacturing?

Oct. 12, 2015

More than 250 people attended the first Smart Industry conference. We want to know what they're planning to do with what they learned.

How can you use smart manufacturing to change the way your business runs in the future? That is the information we hope the over 250 attendees of Smart Industry 2015 gained from the conference, which launched last week in Chicago.

This action-taking theme began with Smart Industry publisher Tony D’Avino’s opening comments, where he noted business management guru Peter Drucker’s frequent challenge to his consulting clients, “Don’t tell me you had a wonderful meeting with me. Tell me what you’re going to do on Monday that’s different.”

Rory Smith from ThyssenKrupp Elevator answers a question from the audience during the plenary panel discussion on Tuesday, October 6, while Microsoft's Kevin Miller (left) looks on.

Photo credit: Tori Soper Photography

Kevin Miller, Microsoft principal program manager for Azure IoT, continued the action orientation as he described how ThyssenKrupp Elevator used Industrial IoT technologies to improve the company’s maintenance abilities. The big thing, Miller explained, is to apply analysis today to find new insights and do something about them.

The Internet of Things has to exist in the real world, and Miller treated the audience to a live demonstration of how the Azure portal can be quickly used to gain insight, improve efficiency and increase productivity.

Miller encourages businesses to start with efficiency improvements. Many people, he said, save enough money in the efficiency step that they can then improve the rest of their business model.

Rory Smith from ThyssenKrupp emphasized the value his company gained from working with Microsoft to improve their maintenance programs. “We build elevators so we can install them. We install elevators so we can maintain them,” said Smith, Director of ThyssenKrupp’s Strategic Development Americas. The company has been installing and maintaining elevators for over 100 years, and has used all of that knowledge to develop a proactive maintenance schedule to avoid elevator downtime – something that nearly everyone in the room could appreciate.

Learn more about ThyssenKrupp’s IIoT application in Alan Earl’s blog, “ThyssenKrupp Elevator Votes for Reliability.”

What changes are you considering after learning about possible IIoT applications? Use the comments field, below, to let us know.